Ray Pride

One of Hollywood's lasting truisms is, always invest the other guy's money.

But with labors of love, and labors of self-love, and laborious dream projects, sometimes an actor-writer-producer-director-singer-star will get a little ahead of themselves, burning every bit of every form of capital they've earned in their career.

Kevin Spacey. What ever became of this guy? A stellar supporting menace in "Se7en," "The Usual Suspects" and "The United States of Leland," and a grievously sentimental leading man in "K-Pax," "Pay It Forward" and "The Life of David Gale," he's spent more capital than anyone would ever have thought he had in his strange, garish, strangulated, euphorically odd tribute to louche-throated, long-gone lounge songster Bobby Darin, which is more emphatically a tribute to Spacey as performer and director (and caterer to self).

Starting from the choice to perform Darin's songs--and what is Darin remembered for if not the whippy timbre he brings to standards like "Mack the Knife"?--to the framing of Darin's life as a self-directed autobiography--shades of the unlovely "De-Lovely"!--"Beyond the Sea" is so beyond belief that it has its own gaudy satisfactions. Some won't get past the fact that Spacey's 45 and Darin died at the age of 37 (in 1973), or that Kate Bosworth, playing Sandra Dee, looks as substantially younger than her years as Spacey looks older than his, his 45 looking 55 to her 21 looking 18.

Getting past that, there are so many bizarre things in this gaudy necro-pic to fix upon. The script is credited to Spacey and Lewis Colick ("October Sky," "Ladder 49"), with reported early drafts from Tom Epperson and James Toback, and it's packed with lashings of orotund narration by Spacey. Self-referentiality becomes self-excusing: told early on that "He's too old to play the part," Bob Hoskins, scuttling about as Darin's protective brother-in-law, gets to fill his beefy bellows with "But he was BORN TO PLAY THE PART and you DAMN WELL KNOW IT!" while Spacey smirks in the foreground, director playing Bobby Darin playing director. There's even a disheartening threnody of jokes about Spacey-Darin Kevin-Bobby's receding hairline and borderline risible toupees. Which, of course only yanks our gaze to Spacey's crinkly eyes and under-chin droop and shiny skin beneath 5 o'clock shadow.

We can presume that Kevin Spacey saw "Pennies from Heaven" and other inspired we-all-dream-in-songs works by the late Dennis Potter, and he might have seen Terence Davies' remarkable musical imaginings "Distant Voices, Still Lives" and "The Long Day Closes," the diminished yet burnished design palettes of which are paralleled here. Largely shot in Germany, there's also a heaviness of architecture, ostensibly suggesting the American 1950s, that adds to the oppressive, weathered gloom that brightly garbed dancers gambol within. Eduardo Serra's cinematography manages to be damp and candied at the same time, and almost all of the widescreen images are beautifully composed, mostly sleek, severely acute compositions. The film-within-a-film director-within-a-dream structure also treads painfully on memories of Bob Fosse's great, self-coruscating "All That Jazz."

Among its refrains, "Beyond the Sea" returns to Weill and Brecht's "Mack the Knife," with its references to "Macheath" and Darin's to "Miss Lotte Lenya," which, to most audiences are likely less obtuse than science fiction, partaking in an alienation effect that Brecht could never have dreamed of, yet likely would have admired its obstinate perseverance. There's a bizarre joke in Steve Martin's "L.A. Story," which goes something like this: a quartet of friends are leaving a restaurant, and a loud, gong-like noise resounds, everyone looks around, someone asks, "What's that?" And the reply is, "My BALLLLLLs."

Watching Spacey prancing about dank city streets in a canary-colored suit, surrounded by gleeful, brightly costumed happy-dancers, I couldn't help but think of that bit of comic clangor: This man's got balls, and convictions, no small amount of hubris and absolutely no concern about conveying to an audience what makes Darin matter to him. (Tin Pan Alley? Tin Ear Spacey.) Any and all dramas, conflicts, talents, shortcomings, or dashed hopes of Darin's life remain sealed off. Spacey is not a dramatist, nor is he a documentarian. Spacey does not bother to convey to you or me the particulars of his love of Darin: only his besotted, besozzled, bedazzled, woebegone, ceaselessly promiscuous love of self. Spacey's singing is pretty good, and the spectacle of his pandering and self-pleasuring is never boring, and there's creepy psychosexual subtext to burn: just like Spacey and his investors did with their dough.

"Beyond the Sea" is now crooning.

(2005-01-03)

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